This year's mandatory Windows upgrade - WinXP Service Pack 2 - finally made its way blinking into the daylight over the weekend. But not before prospective upgraders had taken a tour of Microsoft's "test" Extranet and examined some perplexing Active Server Page error messages. This was what greeted readers who followed our advice on Friday, when the "Order SP2 here" page went live.

That page wasn't fully functional, we now know, and was quickly hauled in for maintenance. (The maintenance being that someone had forgotten to write the fulfilment code.) When Microsoft did make the Windows XP SP2 binary itself available, it was dispatched to the Windows Beta site: rather like those Len Deighton spy exchanges where the captive is blindfolded and taken on a mystery ride before being released. However, this is emphatically the final release.

But here we are, and here's what you do. The English language version WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe weighs in at 266.01 MB and is available from servers in Redmond, London and Japan. See this knowledge base article for release notes and installation information.

Demand, not surprisingly, is said to be "high". ®

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How to order WinXP SP2 now